Review: Something from nothing

WHERE do the laws of physics come from? It is one of the most fundamental questions in science. Most physicists say that nature's laws have an objective existence - that they exist "out there" in some Platonic realm, independent of human beings - but there is one who begs to differ. According to Victor Stenger of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the laws that orchestrate the universe are human inventions. And that's not even his most controversial claim.

Stenger is not trying to belittle the laws of physics. He is as convinced as the next physicist that they are an immensely powerful means of encapsulating a vast range of natural phenomena in terms of simple relationships. Stenger, however, draws the reader's attention to the bedrock on which those laws are founded: symmetry.

Symmetry concerns itself with the aspects of an object that remain unchanged when something is done to ...

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